Opensuse 11: Alpha 2 with KDE 4

The biggest change to the second alpha version of Opensuse 11 has to be the inclusion of KDE 4, which now replaces the older KDE version 3.5.8.

Gnome users can look forward to version 2.21.90 of the alternative desktop. Live versions of both flavors give inquisitive users the option of risking a trial run without migrating to the current version which still contains a fair number of bugs.

Under the hood the distribution now has the new kernel 2.6.24, which not only supports more wireless cards, but also includes an improved scheduler and more efficient process management. At the same time, the tickless system at core of the distribution pays more attention to energy consumption.

A beta version of Open Office 2.4 handles office applications such as word processing, spreadsheets and slideshows. Wine 0.9.54 gives users the ability to run numerous Windows programs, and there is now a Qt 4 version of Sax2, the tool that Suse users have run to set up the screen resolution since time immemorial. On the subject of Qt: the developers are already working hard on a preview version of Qt 4.4.

After saying farewell to the functionally replete Ubuntu 9.10, developers are working on the next version, 10.04, which should be particularly stable. The first alpha of its LTS version has now arrived.